Friday, May 13, 2016

Scratch & Sniff New York

Scratch upon the surface veneer of New York City and you can usually find the historical foundations which lie beneath the modern city. At least you can with this new Urban Scratchoff map.

Urban Scratchoff is a map which presents modern aerial imagery of New York. However if you click and drag on the map you can wipe away the modern imagery to reveal historical aerial imagery of the city beneath. It is also possible to reverse the order of the modern and historical imagery on the map. This allows you to view the historical imagery and scratch upon the map to reveal the modern imagery underneath.

The code for the map is available on GitHub - so if you have access to your own historical aerial imagery you can create a similar map for your own city or town. The code will also work with any base map layers. You could therefore create a similar map which allows you to scratch upon a modern map to view an historical vintage map layer beneath.